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aneurysm. And there he would find stories of hope. Stories of miracles. They would make him believe, if only for a moment, that the wife he still loved would one day be able to hold her son in her arms.

CHAPTER THREE
    J oelle listened to a novel on tape as she drove toward Berkeley and her parents’ home. She kept having to rewind it, because her mind was wandering, and finally she turned the tape off altogether. Fiction no longer seemed as gripping to her as her own life.
    It was her father’s birthday, and she’d promised to make the two-hour drive to Berkeley to help him celebrate. Celebrate was probably the wrong word. It was to be a quiet dinner, just her parents and herself. Her parents weren’t much for birthdays. Gifts, for example, were not allowed. She had received no birthday gifts from her parents in all the thirty-four years of her life, although she’d received many gifts from them at other times. Her parents didn’t believe in giving because you were expected to, but rather because you were moved to. Nor did her parents believe in celebrating holidays.No Christmas. No Hanukkah. They attended some tiny Berkeley church, the denomination of which Joelle could never remember, that honored the sacred spirit in all of nature, and Joelle was never surprised to find a pot of dried leaves or a bowl of shells or fruit on the so-called altar in their so-called meditation room. No one was allowed in that room unless they were there to meditate. For two people who eschewed society’s rules and traditions, Ellen Liszt and Johnny Angel had created plenty of their own.
    That was the way Joelle had been raised. She’d lived the first ten years of her life as Shanti Joy Angel in the Cabrial Commune in Big Sur. It was a time she remembered with remarkable clarity: eating a strictly vegetarian diet, worshiping nature, learning not to play too near the edge of the cliffs, the way some children learned not to play in the street. Growing up there, she’d taken the magic of Big Sur for granted. Sometimes now, though, she remembered it with longing. She missed the view of the bluffs carving their way through the blue and green water, the dark, cool forest, the ubiquitous fog that washed over them in the morning and late afternoon, which made games of hide-and-seek thrilling and scary. You never knew who or what was mere inches away from you. Her mother and a few of the other parents had taught the children in one of the cabins, the commune’s one-room schoolhouse, and by the time Joelle entered public school, she had been far ahead of her classmates.
    She had been grateful, then, that she’d spent ten years in the commune. Her life there had given her skills that other children did not seem to have. She could talk with anyone, of any age group, about nearly any subject. The commune had provided her with nonjudgmental acceptance and plenty of fuel for her imagination. It had taught her to take care of other people, and she was certain that was one reason she’d become a social worker.
    Somehow, though, over the last twenty-four years, she’dpicked up the mores and conventions of the outside world and had made them very much her own. Maybe it was the talk she’d had with her parents when she turned thirteen, three years after they left the commune, that had influenced her. For some reason, her parents began confiding in her then, apparently deciding that thirteen was the appropriate age for that sort of conversation. They had believed in free love, they told her, the sharing of partners, as well as of food and clothing and chores, and that had been fine for both of them at first. But they began to feel that age-old emotion they had been trying to suppress for a decade: jealousy. As the feeling ate away at each of them, they decided it was time to leave, to rejoin the world. Maybe the way of the commune had not been intended for a lifetime, after all. Yet, although her parents were